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What is a Make Something Edmonton project?

Since I wrote about a Make Something Edmonton campaign, as a way to celebrate, discover, and enunciate Edmonton’s identity, provocative readers have asked: how the hell would it work? You can’t just ask for ideas. That’s all you’ll get. We don’t have a salaried army of people out there shepherding ideas to reality, at least not in any focused way. How does a busy citizen with a job or a family Make Something Edmonton?

The first answer is: you’re already doing it. First of all, you’re reading a nerdy post about Edmonton’s story. You’ve started a company, you’re working in the public sector, you’re a student or a blogger or a playwright or a plumber who volunteers at the community league. If all you do is talk about Edmonton in a different way, and share some of those stunning pictures of the Northern Lights, you’re contributing.

If you have the courage to make something, Edmonton is your city.

The proof is everywhere: Edmonton doesn’t lure head offices with 12,000 employees to Edmonton. We build them from 3 to 12,000. We don’t import festivals. We build them from 60 to 680,000.

So what can a regular person do, today? What are you making?

When the trams in Strasbourg arrive at a station, a recording comes on. This happens in public transit all over the world: a robot voice says the name of the station. But in Strasbourg, when you approach a station — say, Place Broglie — a short bit of music will play. The music is different at each station.

It is not good music. There is a “dude with a synthesizer” quality about it.

If I were to tell Edmontonians who the musicians ought to be, it wouldn’t work. We would need 15 songs for the moment. Soon, when the NAIT line is finished, 18. We’ll find a way to include you in the selection process. Not everyone is on Twitter.

John Mahon, executive director of the Edmonton Arts Council and a fine musician himself, suggested eight second songs instead of five or ten seconds. Again, Edmonton being Edmonton, he offered to help immediately. We refined the idea and presented it to Edmonton Transit. There’s the question of finding money and recording the songs and working out a quality control system, so they sound marvellous. But it’s not a maybe thing. It’s going to happen.

I should say friends from Toronto and Vancouver contacted me about the idea, when they saw it on Twitter. By the end of the conversations, they were more or less sure it couldn’t happen in their cities: too controversial, too much bureaucracy.

What if we had fifty Make Something Edmonton projects? Not simply in the arts realm but in every realm? Attached to a story about Edmonton that happens to be true?

16 thoughts on “What is a Make Something Edmonton project?”

“What if we had fifty Make Something Edmonton projects? Not simply in the arts realm but in every realm?” I love this question, because it’s so open-ended. In every realm! Making Edmonton a more positive experience for those who live here and who visit here. I couldn’t agree more. Imagine if – instead of complaining about mosquitoes in the summer, or snowpiles in the winter – we embraced our own city and spoke of her in endearing terms. Like a child, encouraged to grow, she would blossom. I can’t wait to see what kinds of ideas we come up with.

I would really like to see if the photographer could do my participation pictures. I want outstanding facilitates to make sure it looks amazing. In Edmonton, there are so many types, but I don\’t know which one to go with.